The first full day
of winter Sunday brought a mix including balmy temperatures along the
Mid-Atlantic, snow in the Midwest and ice, snow and flooding in the
Great Lakes, and utilities warned that some people who lost electricity
could remain in the dark through Wednesday.

More than 390,000
homes and businesses were without power Monday in Michigan, upstate New
York and northern New England, down from Sunday's peak of more than a
half million. The bulk were in Michigan, where more than 297,000
customers remained without power Monday. The state's largest utilities
said it will be days before most of those get their electricity back
because of the difficulty of working around ice-broken lines.

In
Maine, the number of people without power spiked to more than 68,000. A
medical clinic in Bangor lost power, forcing walk-in patients to seek
other options.

"It's certainly not going away," Margaret Curtis, a
meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Gray, Maine, said
Monday of the precipitation and cold. "In fact, we don't have very many
areas where we're expecting temperatures to rise above freezing."...

At
least nine deaths in the U.S. were blamed on the storm, including five
people killed in flooding in Kentucky and a woman who died after a
tornado with winds of 130 mph struck in Arkansas.

Authorities
reduced the speed limit along a 107-mile stretch of the Maine Turnpike
from Kittery to Augusta as freezing rain continued to fall Monday
morning and temperatures hovered around freezing. Dozens of flights out
of Toronto were canceled while other airports in the storm-hit region
were faring well despite the weather.

More than 200 flights were
canceled in the U.S. by 2 p.m. Monday, the bulk of them in Chicago,
Denver, Houston and Dallas, according to FlightAware. The number is in
line with a typical travel day and much improved from Sunday's 700 or so
cancellations. There are typically more than 30,000 daily flights in
the United States.

Power
failures caused related concerns. Vermont's Department of Health warned
people to be careful with generators and other equipment after a
weekend spike in carbon monoxide poisonings. The department had half a
dozen reports in one day, about what the state sees in a typical winter.

While
the cold will continue to harass people, there's no major precipitation
on the horizon through the end of the week, Curtis said....

Meanwhile,
flooding in Ohio and Indiana caused no reported injuries but forced
some small-scale evacuations and closed several roads.

Heavy snow
in Wisconsin forced dozens of churches to cancel Sunday services.
Milwaukee got about 9 inches and Manitowoc, 7. Ice and snow in Oklahoma
were blamed for three traffic deaths on slick roads.

The winter weather was far from nationwide,
though. Record high temperatures were reached in some Mid-Atlantic
states this weekend, but temperatures were expected to drop back to the
mid-30s by Monday night.

On Sunday, the mercury reached 70 degrees
in New York's Central Park, easily eclipsing the previous high of 63
from 1998. Records were also set in Wilmington, Del., (67), Atlantic
City, N.J., (68), and Philadelphia (67). Washington tied its 1889 mark
at 72." image 23 ABC. --------------------------Updated, Ed. note:It's now 19F in Midtown Manhattan, 7:51AM, Dec. 25, 2013. It was 32F in Manhattan at 9:30pm, Tues., 12/24/13.